Robocars and Urban Planning

Robocars will have a huge effect on the way we
live in cities, of
that I am confident. Just what that effect will be is much harder to
predict. It's not sure if anybody truly understands the city and all
its emegent properties well enough to come to firm conclusons.

Nonetheless, I think any examination of the city of the future is diminished
if it doesn't account for the many potential changes brought about by
robocars. I describe many of these changes in other essays, but
felt it might be good to outline them briefly here to solicit comment
from planners on how they see the robots changing the city.

Transportation has always played a large role in defining all patterns
of habitation, be they farms, suburbs or cities. Many would say the
car is directly responsible for the birth of the suburb. The density
of cities is also regulated by how well people can get in and out of them
and move within them.

If you are coming to this article cold, without having read about what robocars
are and their many consequences, some of the claims here will seem somewhat far-fetched.
You may want to read the other materials linked to on this web site, or other sources,
to understand just how quickly this technology is coming.

It is also worth noting that many of these effects take place only as
robocar (and in particular robotaxi) penetration becomes fairly high.
Many of them are gradual, though, and start affecting the patterns
of travel for the robocar users even if they are few.

The Death of Distance

The robocar trip will be in a pleasant cocoon which has computerized
suspension and slow acceleration. It could feature a desk, display,
internet, books, videos, videoconferencing or face-to-face seating
when moving as a group. The time in the car should be productive work
or leisure time, not time taken out of the day. Trips still take time
but I have called this the
"poor man's teleporter."

(I've also written about slower, more efficient sleeper cars.
These could affect where people put vacation homes, or even some commutes.)

Reliable, short travel times

The robocar is not a teleporter, of course, and people will not
completely disregard travel time. Robocars may offer reliable and
quick travel times over short distances. Today a two mile trip can
involve traffic congestion, finding and getting in and out of parking and
more. The robocar should create a larger zone of destinations that can
be reached in very short times, like 5 minutes. This may confer other
advantages on density, allowing a dense 2-3 mile zone with a million people
who can all get anywhere in under 10 minutes.

Note that congestion reduction of this short requires "smart streets"
(robotic or human driven vehicles) and is still some time away.

Major changes in mass transit

Elsewhere I detail how robocars might spell
the decline of transit because they could potentially be faster, personal, higher
capacity and more energy efficient than existing transit systems. Even if
transit remains dominant at rush-hour due to capacity constraints, self-driving
taxis are likely to supplant it to a large degree in the off hours, radically
changing its economics.

The decline of transit also implies changes to transit oriented development, and
urban clusters centered around transit hubs and stations.
This may be combined with robocar oriented development.

The decline of mass transit will be fairly slow, both because of the time
needed for high robocar penetration and the opposition to it due to
conservatism and municipal bureaucracy. (I refer to the incorrect
opposition here. There will be both valid and invalid opposition, but
both types will play a role.)

In addition, I predict a new style of transit will arise to handle the rush hour peaks. Read
about it at
the future of transit.

Less need for walking

Robocars eventually will deliver people door to door, and small electric ones might
potentially enter buildings and go right to elevator lobbies -- or even ride some
elevators. While people may enjoy walking, it probably will reduce if there
is no strict need for it. This may mean less pass-by traffic other than
deliberate strollers or people walking short distances -- not even people
moving from parking and transit stations to their destinations. Many
urban dynamics depend on these walkers. There is also the potential,
as parking lots are repurposed, for a reversal of this.

See below for notes on children (who in the suburbs rarely walk to school
any more in the pre-teen age groups.)

More ability for walking and mode-shifts

Robotaxis offer a novel ability for car-users to take one-way trips. This
means that having a car take you one place, walking a mile and having
a car take you back home is entirely practical. Other mode shift
trips, like car-subway-car, or "train downtown, car-back-home" or
"carpool to work, robotaxi back home" become practical.

This is at odds with the current approach, where once you use your private
car to begin a trip, you must do all legs of the trip (other than round-trip
detours) by car. People often drive a short distance with their car (if
parking is easy) just to avoid having to walk back to get their car.

While using a robotaxi for all legs of a trip does remain attractive
(particularly for the elderly on in weather,) we may see more use of suitable
alternate modes for different legs of a trip.

Delivery Robots

The "Deliverbot" might deliver just about
anything in under 30 minutes, not just a pizza. Quick delivery warehouses
could send you almost any product in less time and for less money than it
would take you to
pop out to a nearby store and get it, as long as you don't need to see it
in hand to select it. (Don't like it? Send it back and get something
different in a very short time.)

Short-term rental

Deliverbots offer the potential to rent many things on demand, and get them
in a very short time, then be rid of them just as quickly. This goes beyond
carpet cleaning machines to large items like guest bedroom furninshings, party
hosting gear, a well-stocked workshop or large exercise equipment. People
can save money, and space by keeping an area of the house (the former garage?)
which changes purpose every day.

Food delivery

Restaurants are a large part of urban character. But they are a notoriously
difficult business to run. Many chefs may seek to maintain just a kitchen,
and deliver hot, fresh, quality food to people in a radius of a few miles
via deliverbot. Beyond pizza, chefs make work taking orders in advance,
getting fresh ingredients just-in-time by deliverbot and wasting nothing, and employing
no waiters. Restaurants as social places won't go away, but demand will
change.

Different urban synergies

A "destination" retailer or service, such as a major department store or
a big cinema may decide it does not gain much advantage from being in a
central downtown. With little walk-in traffic, it may move to the outskirts
for cheaper rent while still offering short travel times for customers or
people going somewhere else in a CBD. This could result in "downtown sprawl."
This is already a feature of many late 20th century towns (often suburbs who
developed commercial bases) which have no pedestrian downtowns.

Garages, Parking and Streets

Robocars don't park, they "stand" and can do so not just in parking spaces
but in front of fire hydrants and driveways, and even in rows triple-parked
on the side of streets. My vision of robocars also means much greater use
of single-person cars for urban trips, which store in 1/3 to 1/4 the space
of current cars, super-valet style. The enabling of
siginficant car sharing
also means a huge reduction in the total number of vehicles which are not
in motion. This is fully detailed in the article on
robocar parking.

This means there is far less need for parking lots, which take up a large
amount of our urban and suburban spaces. These lots might get repurposed as
green spaces, buildings or additional street capacity. People also will
have less need for garages in their homes. This allows an increase in
urban density for walkability.

Robocars at high penetration also enable one-way streets and narrow streets. The "street" in
a residential cul-du-sac may be a small narrow thing, safely shared with
pedestrians and cyclists and children.

Grids of one-way streets improve traffic flow and safety, and are much
more acceptable to people in robocars. While getting to a particular
point may require a small backtrack, it's all handled by the vehicle and
the slight extra time is productive, and more than made up for by
other improvements in the trip. Streets may also be reversed at rush
hour to increase capacity.

Increased Road Capacity

Once penetration becomes high, robocars offer the potential to
vastly increase the capacity of our existing road network and new
roads. This might mean either a lesser need for roads, or more likely more
intense use of them. The maximum density of urban spaces is governed in
part by transportation capacity. Roboars may enable much larger and
more dense cities if this is where market forces drive things.

Other advanced transporation technologies may allow metering of road use
so that most roads rarely exceed their capacity. While this reduces
congestion, it also reduces residential build-out that goes beyond transportation
capacity limits.

The Rule of Children

So much of the housing decision is based on parents' wishes for
children, and the suburb largely exists for this reason.
They seek good schools, safe homes with pleasant and private
yards, good neighbourhoods and places to play. They want children to have
easy access to all their activites and friends. Robocars could
take
children to school without burdening the parents, allowing easy attendance
of remote schools -- even including play visits to friends from that
school who live far away. Similarly robocars could take children to
soccer matches and other activities, or take children and parents together
to parks, play dates and play spaces.

In theory, a child might live on a farm and still participate in school,
play and events like an urban child. Will parents push in this direction,
or will they prefer pleasant urban spaces with more walking?

Mobility for all

Robocars offer mobility for the disabled and the aged who do not have the ability
to drive conventional cars. This population has rarely had mobility that's as
good as that of the general population, and superior to today's standards.

Surveillance

Because robocars are equipped with cameras and sensors which record everything
around them in 3-D, and they will for many years to come retain these recordings
for debugging and accident-evidence purposes, they offer the potential for
a high level of surveillance of public and private spaces. These are just some
of the robocar privacy implications.

The nature of cars

Cars form part of the urban landscape, and they will be changing quite a bit as well.
There is a different article on engineering changes in cars to consider.

Beyond driving

It's not out of the question that robocars might be able to
walk short
distances as well as roll. Such a car allows houses to be vehicle
accessible when they are not on streets. This can alter urban design.

Robots will do more than drive. They may have a role in policing, putting
out fires and bringing us to medical help.

Polycentrism & access to pleasant environments

Robocars may expand the sphere of utility for urban attractions such as retail
streets, restaurant clusters and parks. Being a short walk from such locations is valued and this
shows in real estate values. Robocars may expand the zone considered proximate
to these attractions by offering a quick, on-demand trip in 1-2 minutes total
time to the walkable zone. They are likely to encourage polycentric urban
spaces by offering public (taxi) transportation that is not tied to corridors.

This could create the concept of the Neighbourhood Elevator, a
small robocar shuttle that works as the analog of the elevators in the buildings of high
density urban areas.